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Category Archives: Mint

In technological terms, this is an amazing time to be alive.
In many ways, the advances in computing over the last 20-odd years have changed the way we live.
The specific advance that concerns me in this post is the ability to securely and remotely connect from my computer at home, to the computer in the office.
These days, remote working of this nature often requires the Citrix Receiver to be installed on the client machine – i.e. the one I’m using at home.
In my case, this machine is almost certainly running a Linux OS.
This shouldn’t be a problem. After all, the Citrix Receiver is available for Linux. However, as with any application available on multiple platforms, any bugs may be specific to an individual platform.
I was reminded of this recently. Whilst my Windows and Mac using colleagues were able to use the Citrix Receiver with no problems, I found the lack of a working keyboard when connecting to my work machine something of a handicap.
What follows is a quick overview of the symptoms I experienced, together with the diagnosis of the issue. Then I go through the workaround – i.e. uninstalling the latest version of the Receiver and installing the previous version in it’s place.Continue reading →

One evening recently, whilst climbing the wooden hills with netbook in hand, I encountered a cat who had decided that halfway up the stairs was a perfect place to catch forty winks.
One startled moggy later, I had become the owner of what I can only describe as…an ex-netbook.

Now, finally, I’ve managed to get a replacement (netbook, not cat).

As usual when I get a new machine, the first thing I did was to replace Windows with Linux Mint…with the immediate result being that the wireless card stopped working.

The solution ? Don’t (kernel) panic, kernel upgrade !

Support for most of the hardware out there is included in the Linux Kernel. The kernel is enhanced and released every few months. However, distributions, such as Mint, tend to stick on one kernel version for a while in order to provide a stable base on which to develop.
This means that, if Linux is not playing nicely with your Wireless card/web-cam/any other aspect of your machine’s hardware, a kernel upgrade may resolve your problem.
Obviously it’s always good to do a bit of checking to see if this might be the case.
It’s also good to have a way of putting things back as they were should the change we’re making not have the desired effect.

What I’m going to cover here is the specific issue I encountered with my new Netbook and the steps I took to figure out what kernel version might fix the problem.
I’ll then detail the kernel upgrade itself.

Getting it up and running was a bit more of a challenge than I had anticipated.
The Pi uses HDMI for Video output and my ageing monitor is not equipped for HDMI…

The best program on TV – NOOBS doing it’s thing.

In the end, I had to “borrow” the TV.
This arrangement was, of necessity, extremely temporary. The TV had to be back in it’s usual place ready for The Strictly-TOWIE-Dancing-Get-Me-Out-Of-Here Christmas Special, on pain of pain.
Therefore, my first Pi project was to connect to it remotely from another machine, namely, my Linux Mint Laptop.
This will enable me to run the Pi headless (i.e. without a monitor/keyboard/mouse attached to it).

I’m going to cover two different methods of connecting to the Pi.
The first is using ssh to connect to the command line.
The second is to connect remotely to the Raspbian desktop itself.

Just to avoid any confusion, I will be referring to the Raspberry Pi as “the Pi” and the machine I’m connecting from as “Mint”.Continue reading →

“Github ?” said Deb, “sounds like a chat room for grumpy old men. You should fit right in !”
To be fair, neither of us were in a particularly good mood at the time.
Deb had just been made to sit through the Rugby World Cup Final whilst my emergency backup nationality had finally born fruit.
All I said to her was that it’s nice to be able to support a real country rather than a mere principality, like Wales. Honestly, some people are so touchy.

For my part, I had just discovered that Github, based on the Git source control system written by Linus Torvalds himself, has integrated clients for Windows and Mac, but not for Linux.

No matter. If you want to interact with Github, you’ll need to have Git installed on your client machine anyway and, mine being Linux, there are a number of GUIs available for Git.

Aside from the Git documentation itself, which is extensive, there are a number of excellent guides to both Git and Github available.
Rather than re-hashing these – although I will link some of them – I’m going to look at things from a slightly different perspective.

Throughout my career, I’ve been, first and foremost, a database developer.
Way back when, choices of version control systems were rather limited. In a professional sense, I grew up with PVCS and Visual Source Safe.
Even later on, the fact that Oracle Forms and Reports were binary source code meant that the Edit-Merge paradigm of source control was something that tended not to gain traction in the Oracle Shops that I worked in.

Later on, in larger organisations, Perforce was the tool of choice, although always with the comforting P4Win ( and later P4V) front-end.

So, I’d rather like the comfort of a GUI, if only to see that the files I think I’ve checked in are actually there.

Additionally, Github uses an enhanced version of the Markdown language for text files. It would be nice to be able to preview these files before uploading them to the repository.